Catholics: Changed HHS Mandate Is Old Wine In A New Bottle

ObamaCare: Faced with a string of court losses to those defending the First Amendment and religious liberty, HHS reworded its contraceptive mandate. But those who were fooled once won’t be fooled again.

While liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, on these pages, and others have declared the new Health and Human Services regulations forcing religious institutions to violate their consciences as some sort of victory for the Catholic Church, any more such victories will surely mean the end of religious liberty in this country.

Certainly the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops does not accept what HHS calls an "accommodation" as a victory. It views freedom of religion as an absolute enshrined in the First Amendment of a Constitution that begins with "We the people." It does not see it as an accommodation to be reached with a bureaucracy guided by the language, "the Secretary shall determine." Current HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, or her successor, could "determine" something different down the road.

"It appears to offer second-class status to our first-class institutions in Catholic health care, Catholic education and Catholic charities. HHS offers what it calls an 'accommodation' rather than accepting the fact that these ministries are integral to our church and worthy of the same exemption as our Catholic churches," said Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The original HHS mandate exempted religious institutions but let the government decide what a religious institution was. A church would be exempt but a charity run by the church would not, for example, if it employed or served people of a different faith or no faith at all. Not much has changed, except for word games, in the revised regulations, in the views of the Catholic bishops.

The proposed "compromise" offered by HHS expands the religious exemption to cover certain religious affiliated groups — mostly those that are tightly affiliated with a single religious congregation. But Catholic universities, many schools, hospitals and charitable organizations are not. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, said the new proposals remain "coercive and gravely flawed."

The new proposals include allowing religiously affiliated hospitals and universities to be exempt from providing contraceptive coverage; insurance companies would deal directly with individual employees. As we have noted previously, many religious institutions are self-insured, so that is a distinction without a difference.

Even if not, saying the insurers to whom these institutions pay premiums to will provide contraceptives themselves is nonsense. The religious institutions pay and are forced to violate their consciences one way or the other.

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